The Hopwood Awards are a major scholarship program at the University of Michigan, founded by Avery Hopwood.
Breyten Breytenbach is a South African writer, poet, and painter who became internationally well-known as a dissident poet and vocal critic of South Africa under apartheid, and as a political prisoner of the National Party-led South African Government. Breytenbach is now informally considered by Afrikaans-speakers as their poet laureate and is one of the most important living poets in Afrikaans literature. He also holds French citizenship.
Robert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. His first two terms as United States Poet Laureate were marked by such visible dynamism—and such national enthusiasm in response—that the Library of Congress appointed him to an unprecedented third term. Throughout his career, Pinsky has been dedicated to identifying and invigorating poetry's place in the world. Known worldwide, Pinsky's work has earned him the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize, Italy's Premio Capri, the Korean Manhae Award, and the Harold Washington Award from the City of Chicago, among other accolades. Pinsky is a professor of English and creative writing in the graduate writing program at Boston University. In 2015 the university named him a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor, the highest honor bestowed on senior faculty members who are actively involved in teaching, research, scholarship, and university civic life.
Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes or with various traditions of poetry and poetics. Due to the looseness of the definition, it is possible for writing such as feature stories to be considered creative writing, even though it falls under journalism, because the content of features is specifically focused on narrative and character development. Both fictional and non-fictional works fall into this category, including such forms as novels, biographies, short stories, and poems. In the academic setting, creative writing is typically separated into fiction and poetry classes, with a focus on writing in an original style, as opposed to imitating pre-existing genres such as crime or horror. Writing for the screen and stage—screenwriting and playwriting—are often taught separately, but fit under the creative writing category as well.
Zulfikar Ghose was a Pakistani-American novelist, poet and essayist. His works are primarily magical realism, blending fantasy and harsh realism.
Fred D'Aguiar is a British-Guyanese poet, novelist, and playwright of Portuguese descent. He is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Cirilo F. Bautista was a Filipino poet, critic and writer of nonfiction. A National Artist of the Philippines award was conferred on him in 2014.
Alfred A. Yuson, also known as Krip Yuson, is a Filipino author of novels, poetry and short stories.
Hans Ansgar Ostrom is an American professor, writer, editor, and scholar. Ostrom is a professor of African American Studies and English the University of Puget Sound (1983–present), where he teaches courses on African-American literature, creative writing, and poetry as a genre. He is known for his authorship of various books on African-American studies and creative writing, and novels including Three to Get Ready, Honoring Juanita, and Without One, as well as The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976–2006.
David Gordon Brooks is an Australian poet, novelist, short-fiction writer and essayist. He is the author of four published novels, four collections of short stories and five collections of poetry, and his work has won or been shortlisted for major prizes. Brooks is a highly intellectual writer, and his fiction has drawn frequent comparison with the writers Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.
Jason Nelson is a digital and hypermedia poet and artist. He is Associate Professor of Digital Culture and a PI at the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen, where he was also a Fulbright Fellow from 2016-17. Until 2020 he was a lecturer on Cyberstudies, digital writing and creative practice at Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. He is best known for his artistic flash games/essays such as Game, game, game and again game and I made this. You play this. We are Enemies. He has worked on the Australia Council of the Arts Literature Board and the Board of the Electronic Literature Organization based at MIT.
Robert Schaeffer Phillips was an American poet and professor of English at the University of Houston. He was the author or editor of more than 30 volumes of poetry, fiction, poetry criticism and other works.
David St. John is an American poet.
Jonathan Holden, the first Poet Laureate of Kansas, was a Professor of English at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas. Chosen in 2004, his two-year term began July 1, 2005. He was succeeded by Denise Low on July 1, 2007.
Karl Kirchwey is an American poet, essayist, translator, critic, teacher, arts administrator, and literary curator. His career has taken place both inside and outside of academia. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Boston University, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and in the MFA degree program in Literary Translation. His published work includes seven books of poems, two poetry anthologies, and a translation of French poet Paul Verlaine’s first book of poems.
Mary Quade is an American writer of poetry and nonfiction. In 2003, her poetry collection Guide to Native Beasts won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize, chosen by judge Marilyn Krysl. Her second collection, Local Extinctions, was published in 2016 by Gold Wake Press. Her essay collection Zoo World, won the 2022 The Journal Non/Fiction Prize, chosen by judge Michelle Herman, and was published in 2023 by The Ohio State University / Mad Creek Books Imprint in 2023. She earned her A.B. from the University of Chicago and her M.F.A. from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her work has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship (2001) and four Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards. She is a Professor of English at Hiram College where she teaches creative writing.
Van G. Garrett is an American poet, novelist, teacher, and photographer. Garrett's poetry has appeared in a number of well-known American literary journals, including: African American Review; The Amistad; ChickenBones; Drumvoices Revue; Obsidian III; phati’tude Literary Magazine; Pittsburgh Quarterly; Potomac Review; and StepAway Magazine. His works have also been published internationally, including in: Istanbul Literature Review (Turkey); One Ghana, One Voice; Poems Niederngasse (Switzerland); and White Chimney (UK). Garrett often writes poetry with haiku or kwansaba structures.
Marcus Wicker is an American poet. He won the 2011 National Poetry Series Prize for his collection Maybe the Saddest Thing and a 2014 Pushcart Prize for his poem "Interrupting Aubade Ending In Epiphany". He teaches creative writing in the MFA program at the University of Memphis.
David Starkey is an American poet and academic, and former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California.
Paul Dawson is an Australian writer of poetry and fiction and a scholar in the fields of narrative theory and the study of creative writing. He is an associate professor at the University of New South Wales in the School of the Arts and Media. He teaches creative Writing, literary theory, North American Literature, and British and Irish Literature.
